Apple's new maps app is upgraded but full of snags

Last week, I used Apple's new Maps app on my iPhone to guide me to a speaking engagement.

Last week, I used Apple’s new Maps app on my iPhone to guide me to a speaking engagement.

The GPS navigation screen was clean, bold and distraction-free. The voice instructions spoke the actual street names. The prompts gave me just the right amount of time to prepare for each turn.

There was only one problem: When the app told me that I had arrived, I was sitting in a random suburban cul-de-sac. Children were playing in the front yard, the sky was a crisp blue, and I was late for my talk.

As almost everyone knows by now, that’s not an unusual tale. Horror stories about Apple’s maps — and ridicule — are flooding the Internet.

The iPhone’s old mapping app was powered by Google. But in the new iOS 6 software for iPhones and iPads, Apple replaced Google’s maps with its own, built from scratch.

Unfortunately, in this new app, the Washington Monument has been moved to a new spot across the street. The closest thing Maps can find for “Dulles Airport” is “Dulles Airport Taxi.” Search for Cleveland, Ga., and you’ll wind up right smack in Cleveland, Tenn. Riverside Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., is in the right place but the wrong decade; it became a Publix supermarket 11?y ears ago.

And on and on and on. Entire lakes, train stations, bridges and tourist attractions have been moved, mislabeled or simply erased. Satellite photo views consist of stitched-together scenes from completely different seasons, weather conditions and even years. The point-of-interest data, in particular, seems to be incomplete or flaky, especially overseas (many snarky examples at theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com).

The most-stunning new feature, Flyover, offers interactive, photorealistic 3-D models of major cities — but some scenes have gone horribly wrong. The Brooklyn Bridge has melted into the river, the road to the Hoover Dam plunges straight down into a canyon, and Auckland’s main train station is in the middle of the sea.

In short, Maps is an appalling first release. It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.

Yes, it adds spoken turn-by-turn directions, auto-rerouting and a 3-D view of your route, all of which the old app lacked. Its design is elegant, smart and attractive. Flyover is neat. And Maps works beautifully with Siri; setting a destination is as easy as saying, “Give me directions to the White House,” and off you go. The spoken instructions continue even if you turn off the screen.

But Maps is missing Street View, which lets you see street-level photos of any address (it has taken Google’s photo cars 5 million miles of driving through 3,000 cities in 40 countries to build it). It’s also missing public-transportation guidance; where Google’s maps could show you what buses or subways to take, the new app just hands you off to a list of independent bus- and train-schedule apps.

And while you’re navigating, you can’t zoom out from that spare, elegant routing screen to look ahead at your itinerary — to pick a better route on your own, for example. You can tap an Overview button for that kind of map, but now you’re flipping between two displays.

As the magnitude of Mapplegate (as one of my readers calls it) became clearer, I had three questions.

First, why did Apple jettison Google’s map service, which is polished and mature? Second, how did Apple and its elite squad of perfectionists misfire so badly?

Third, what, exactly, is the underlying problem, and how long will it take to fix?

After poking around, here’s what I’ve learned.

First, why Apple dropped the old version: Google, it says, was saving all the best features for phones that run its Android software. For example, the iPhone app never got spoken directions or vector maps (smooth lines, not tiles of pixels), long after those features had come to rival phones.

The even greater issue might be data. Every time you use Google’s maps, you’re sending data from your phone to Google. That information — how you’re using maps, where you’re going, which roads actually exist — is extremely valuable; it can be used to improve the maps and to improve Google’s ability to deliver location-based offers and advertising.

Apple has written a beautiful, well-designed app — and fed it questionable data. It’s as though you just got a $1,500 professional coffee maker and then poured moldy beans into it.

So where are we, then?

Since the data is all online, Apple can introduce fixes instantly as they’re made, but “it’s not going to change by Friday,” says a product manager. That’s because, in general, the fixes have to be made one at a time, by hand.

Unfortunately, making Apple Maps reliable and complete will take a very long time. (Google’s maps were pretty poor when they started out, too — in 2005.)

In the meantime, while Apple’s gaffe might make good entertainment, it’s not the end of the world; there are plenty of alternatives.